If you can win the fight, and there's not that much to talk about, violence is the answer. The American Revolution, the Civil War, World War 2.
If you can't win the fight, violence isn't the answer but sometimes there is a way. The US civil rights movement, Gandhi's movement for Indian independence. It doesn't mean you won't have to fight. But when the badness of the landscape is more to do with everyone's attitudes and understand of the world, and they're assigning "the good guys" to the wrong people, and "a good system" to something that's destroying you, sometimes going to war against all of them without trying to correct the understanding piece is not the answer, because they are going to fight back.
If you can win the fight, but you don't have a good plan for after, and the understanding piece isn't there, sometimes violence makes things much worse even if you win. The French Revolution, the Russian revolution, the Cultural Revolution.
I'm not saying you won't have to fight. Our current political class's apathetic conviction that all they have to do is say the right words, and someone else will come in and put a stop to Trump, is pathetic. But sometimes there's a lot to talk about, too.
Yeah fair enough. Kind of. I guess it is relevant that the end goal was okay. I'm just saying that (a) that came against a backdrop of a highly-educated enlightenment-era elite, with a genuine commitment to better government and better things, a lot of systemic structures of debate and good formal education, the specific recent example of the American Revolution to draw on, and (b) they still executed tens of thousands of people at the hands of successive waves of tyrannical revolutionary governments that sometimes chopped the heads off the previous leaders, before they eventually got their stuff straightened out.
I'm saying that the eventual success is more the exception than the rule, and there were specific reasons supporting the eventual good outcome that a lot of times don't exist when a big bunch of people kills the government.
If you really look into Indian independence, Gandhi had fuck all to do with it. The british lost a lot in the war and they were making concessions. They already had extracted, exploited, and starved the poor and didn't want the overhead of managing large colonies anymore.
That is why the british marked their borders, that is why they still use british governance, that is why the ruling class are still the ones from high caste and status that helped British subjugate the lower class/caste during their rule.
And all that is why there's still a lot of corruption and class/gender/caste/religion conflicts. They just got new sheep in wolf's clothing.
It wasn't some grassroots movement that won over by peace and protest. It was a hand me down.
The US civil rights movement and MLK are often trotted out as examples of nonviolent resistance bringing change, but people forget that he was the carrot to Malcolm X's stick. MLK brought change because the threat of Malcolm X arming the black community and calling for violence was hanging just over his shoulder.
In fact that has been the implicit threat driving democracy. If you give the angry an out though voting, you can get out of the way before the threat of violence.
Attack people's democratic voice and you risk the violent answer.
i mean, right now the question isn't 'violence' it's 'against whom'. we fucked up all the futures that weren't a river of blood. the fascism, the horrors, the manufactured consent and insane obedience. the question isn't "river of blood or not" it's "whose, and how deep?"
I personally would prefer as little as possible and none of it mine, but apparently wars where millions of conscripts die are more ethical than the assassinations of the couple dozen leaders that start them and manufacture consent to keep them going. letting people be disappeared is more ethical than stopping it. letting people die of poverty on the street is more ethical than breaking the locks on dumpsters to feed them, or putting them in vacant/airBNB'd houses.
silver lining: it is at least gonna be really fucking metal. so we've got at least that to look forward to.
Education, economic stability and social mobility, political reforms and democracy, media and free speech, legal protections and human rights movements.
Violence on the other hand, even when it topples oppressive systems, often leads to power vacuums, further repression and new forms of extremism.
we're going to be late to the party and they will be anticipating us because we didn;t take the initiative when we still had a chance to gain surprise.